


Changes in the Way We Are

by le_chat_noir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Illustrated, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, at least a bit. we'll see how that goes, feline traits, slight AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-02-08 10:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12863082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/le_chat_noir/pseuds/le_chat_noir
Summary: Post season 2.Spending more time with their lions, the paladins start to show some unusual qualities. Some of them take a little getting used to, but at least they're all in it together.I have things planned out pretty far, please be patient with me





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so like I said in the summary, I have a lot of things planned already but I'm a super slow writer. I'll add tags and characters as they appear to not spoil anything

"Hunk, for the last time, hands off!" Pidge yelled and the yellow paladin hastily removed his hand from the mess of wires and circuits that was to be a small robot's innards. "If you don't stop messing with my work I'll never get this done!"

"Sorry," Hunk said, but didn't sound that sorry.

It had been roughly three weeks since the team had taken Zarkon head on. The castle had been a mess after the fight; it had been running mostly on auxiliary power after what had been drained in the battle, a lot of systems had overloaded and the backup systems had taken over, and on top of it all the Blameran crystal that powered the castle had hair cracks spreading like spiderweb through half of it. The paladins, the lions, and Allura had been drained of quintessence to the point where they could not function without some serious rest. And on top of all _that_ Shiro had disappeared from the cockpit of the black lion.

To everyone's relief, he reappeared three vargas later, hazy around the edges and still halfway to what he later explained was the astral plane. It took another quintant to haul him all the way back to the right plane of existence though, as none of the other paladins had the quintessence to anchor him to it and pull him through.

Soon after 'Shadow Shiro' had appeared, Kolivan had left them for the Blade of Marmora headquarters. Coran got him to agree to keep in touch though, in case they ever needed to cooperate in the future. Slav stayed on the ship, saying fixing and updating the systems would both give him something to do and raise the probability of all of them living longer. After recovering from most of the damage done to the castle and its occupants, Voltron leaped back into the battle for the universe's sake; Zarkon might be out of commission (Shiro was sure he wasn't dead, to everyone's disappointment) but his empire still ran smoothly as ever and oppressed and conquered the known universe.

Now though, Lance and Hunk were watching as Pidge was building a small robot to use as moving target practice. Or rather, Lance was watching and Hunk was trying to get his hands on the complex power redistribution circuitry while avoiding the small but scorching hot tip of Pidge's soldering tool.

"I just want to look at it," Hunk said with puppy eyes, and slowly reached a hand towards the mess of wires.

"You can look at it when it's done!" Pidge hissed and slapped Hunk's hand away for the nth time. He looked at her like she had just denied him dessert, but was determined to touch the thing.

"Hunk, that's the twenty-seventh slap you've gotten in the last varga," Lance said and poked the yellow paladin with his toe from the stack of crates he was chilling on. "You can look at the robot later when it's done."

"It hasn't been that many times," Hunk denied as he turned to Lance, giving Pidge a rare chance to work uninterrupted.

"Uh huh," Lance insisted. "I've been counting. You've been swatted twenty-seven times, kicked three times," he listed with his fingers, "had tools thrown at you twice, had scraps and robot parts thrown at you five times, and been filliped on the nose once. And it's only a matter of time when she hits you with the soldering iron if you don't stop."

"Don't you have anything better to do than count how many times Pidge has hit me and with what?"

"No, unless I want to get drafted to castle cleaning fun-times with Coran. I have nothing against the guy, but he's doing some pretty obscure parts of the castle today."

Hunk grunted in sympathy, he too knowing that some areas of the castleship were better left alone. Lance had dragged him and Keith to explore the lowest three decks once, and to this day the three of them refused to accept Coran's reassurances -that the dust covering everything down there wasn't ten thousand years old Galra remains- as truth.

While the two were reliving their traumatic memories of dust, Pidge got a moment of peace, but too soon for her Hunk was back to trying to get his hands on her project. She followed the hand slowly approaching the robot with her eyes until it was mere inches away.

Then she pounced. She wrapped her arms around the limb, pushing Hunk halfway to floor in the process, and proceeded to bite his wrist. With the sudden appearance of teeth on his flesh the yellow paladin yelped in alarm and fell the rest or the way off from the crate chair he was sitting on.

"Pidge, what the shit?" Lance yelped as he watched the unexpected scene in front of him.

Hunk was yelling and trying to peel Pidge off without hurting her, while she was hanging on to his swinging arm for dear life while doing her best to bite him at the same time.

Lance sprang to action to help his fellow leg, and grabbed Pidge from under her arms and pulled her off of Hunk. She was hissing like an angered kitten and wriggling in his hold.

Lance half threw half dropped her away from Hunk. "Run, Hunk!" Hunk scrambled up from the floor and made a break for the door, Lance right on his heels. Pidge didn't follow them, but the sound of her furious hissing could be heard even after the automatic door shut behind them, not that they stuck around to listen.

They only stopped their escape after three corridors and a flight of stairs.

"What the heck was that?" Lance panted.

"She's, she's possessed," Hunk heaved. "Gotta be. Look at my wrist!"

Hunk showed Lance his wrist, and on his skin where his glove ended were angry reddening bite marks. Lance winced in sympathy, knowing full well how much bites could hurt even if the skin didn't break.

"Do you need anything for that?" Lance asked. "Like an ice pack or whatever the space equivalent is called."

"No, I'll be fine. I'm more worried about Pidge. What if she is possessed?"

"She almost bit your hand off and you're worried about her? Geez, Hunk."

"I've had worse, heck Lance, you've given me worse bites than this when we were kids. It's just- this isn't Pidge. I know I overdid the whole trying to touch the robot thing but I'd never thought she'd do that."

"Do what?" Keith appeared from a conjoining hallway in full paladin armor. Not hearing his silent approach and still distraught from Pidge’s toothful outburst, Hunk and Lance both jumped. "What did Pidge do?"

Hunk showed the red paladin his mistreated wrist. "She bit me!"

Keith gently grabbed Hunk's hand and turned it this ways and that, inspecting the clearly visible marks. "Nasty," he said after a moment. "Shiro, come look at this."

Now the two noticed Shiro a few paces behind Keith, he too in his armor. The most notable thing though was that he was translucent and hazy around the edges, meaning he was only halfway in the correct dimension.

"Were you practicing the teleport thingy with Black again?" Hunk asked as he held his wrist out for Shiro to see as well.

The black paladin just nodded, unable to convey anything verbally in his current state of existence. He was only photons and thought and quintessence, and couldn't even make air vibrate to create a sound.

"Any progress?" Lance asked Keith who clearly was a part of the exercise. "Need help anchoring him?"

"No," Keith said, "he's trying to get back himself. And not that much progress either."

After the battle with Zarkon and Shiro's brief disappearance to the astral plane he had begun to practice the teleport with Black, but it had the unfortunate side effect of flinging him back there. After the initial three-varga disappearance he hadn't slipped all the way through, but remained a mere shadow of himself until the other paladins or Allura anchored him back to the real world and pulled him through.

"That's a shame," Hunk lamented and rubbed his wrist absently. "That teleport would be a real wonder in battle if it didn't do," he gestured at Shiro, "that every time."

Everyone nodded, Shiro included.

They decided to hang out in the kitchen, since nobody was sure if approaching Pidge was safe (except for Shiro who technically didn't exist and thus couldn't be bitten) and it honestly was one of the best casual hangouts in the castle. Keith made a detour to take off his armor while Shiro, Lance, and Hunk went ahead.

Hunk checked the cabinets for possible cookie ingredients, but sadly didn't find everything needed for it. He'd need to convince Coran they needed cookie ingredients. So instead, he approached the goo dispenser with a small disappointed pout. Shiro sat legs crossed on a counter a bit more to the side, one that Pidge tended to sit on as well. With his approximate lotus position and ethereal state, he looked as if he had reached enlightenment by meditating and was ascending from the plane of mortals to the, well, astral plane. Lance sat on the table and stared offering more or less far-fetched ideas for Shiro.

“Should one of us come to hold your hand through it? Not to shit on your mad piloting skills but like, you need us to ground you back from the astral plane. Could that kind of contact stop you from slipping? Or what if you had the bayard? In your hand and not welded to the console like it is now. Could that do it?”

Shiro listened with one ear, more focused on trying to descend from the astral plane unaided.

“Lance, I think you should let him concentrate,” Hunk suggested one hand in a bowl of goo. “That can’t be easy.”

Lance shrugged an ‘alright’ and stood up to approach Hunk. They started conversing with more hushed voices to give Shiro some peace, not that he still couldn’t hear them not even fully across the room.

“So Hunk, what are you making?” Lance peered into the mixing bowl that contained goo, something added to it that changed its texture and color slightly, and Hunk’s right hand.

“I’m trying to make gookies.”

“Gookies- is that a pun?” Lance groaned.

Hunk chuckled. “Yeah, the kitchen doesn’t have flour or anything resembling an egg and the goo has nice viscosity.”

“What’s that in it? Space chocolate?”

Hunk shrugged. “Might be. It tastes a bit like apples and cream and it’s sweet, so I thought I’d try using it.”

The door opened with a hiss and a now unarmored Keith entered the kitchen. He nodded a greeting to Shiro and came over to the central counter to look what Hunk was making.

“Is that dough or goo?” he asked, peering into the mixing bowl from between Hunk and Lance’s shoulders.

“Both,” Hunk replied. “Dough that’s mostly goo. I’m trying to bake a little bit of home here in space.”

“When will that be done?”

“Patience, young one,” Hunk said with an imitation of a classic cave hermit teacher voice. “One mustn’t rush cookies.”

“That’s going to be cookies?” Keith’s eyebrows made a break for his hairline.

“Don’t look so surprised, Mullet,” Lance said and put an arm around Hunk’s shoulders. “My fellow leg here can make even the food goo taste delicious.”

“It’s- it’s not that,” Keith stuttered. “I don’t doubt Hunk’s cooking. I’m just- cookies. I can’t even remember the last time I had cookies.” He crossed his arms and turned away from them, but Lance and Hunk could both see he was smiling at the thought of cookies.

“I think this is all mixed up,” Hunk stated as he eyed the mixing bowl once more and started scraping the dough off his hand with a spoon. “Lance, get me a baking pan, would you?”

“Sure,” Lance said and went ahead to rummage in the locker beneath the oven. He found one in no time and gave it to Hunk, who with the assistance of another spoon started to set small lumps of dough on the pan with a baker’s precision.

“These won’t probably be in the oven for too long,” Hunk estimated as he put the pan in and closed the hatch. “So, Keith, what happened out there with Shiro?”

Keith turned back to them and leaned on the counter, but didn’t unfold his arms. “The usual, I guess. We did a bit of asteroid slalom, a bit of target practice, and then Shiro tried the teleport- and the rest you can guess.”

“How’s that coming, by the way?” Lance asked. “Any progress?”

Keith shrugged. “He can do three and a half jumps before that happens,” he said and nodded his head sideways at Shiro still sitting cross-legged on the counter. “It’s more than last week and with more precision, but not good enough for battle.”

Hunk and Lance nodded in understanding and a slightly dour silence fell over the three. Right now Shiro and Black’s teleport was only usable as a last resort, or otherwise as a risky move at the end of the battle as using it incapacitated them and prevented Voltron from being formed if the need be.

“So what made Pidge bite you?” Keith asked Hunk.

Hunk shared a look with Lance. “She was building a robot and I wanted to look at it and she wouldn’t let me,” he told. “I _may_ have gone a little overboard with trying to touch it, but I think trying to bite my hand off was an overreaction on her part.”

Keith nodded in thought. “You know, I almost bit Lance yesterday.”

“You almost _what_?!” Lance hissed. “So _that_ was why you were looking at my neck like a vampire during training!”

 

“Was that during your impromptu wrestling match after the training exercise ended in a tie between you?”

“It wasn’t a tie, I won,” Keith said.

“Sure, if we count you flipping me on the floor as an official part of an _exercise in accuracy_ ,” Lance muttered sourly.

“You’re just mad you lost.”

“Guys, why don’t we check on the gookies?” Hunk asked to change the subject before the two might want to continue their match right then and there. “They might be done already.”

Lance and Keith narrowed their eyes at each other, but ignored their hostilities in favor of sandwiching Hunk in front of the oven. “Are they done?” Lance asked.

“They look done, I’ll take them out.”

Hunk pulled the first batch of gookies from the oven and put another in. Their surface had browned where the "space chocolate" chunks had melted, leaving them looking like regular if green-dyed chocolate chip cookies with white chocolate instead of dark. Hunk set the baking pan on the counter and took in the sharp and sweet but faint scent. It was almost identical to the scent of green apple shampoo.

"Can I be the taste tester?" Lance asked, eyeing the finished product with ill-concealed excitement.

"Sure," Hunk said. "But you'll have to wait a while for them to cool a bit first or you'll burn your mouth and hands."

"Can’t you put that in the fridge for a while?" Keith suggested and nodded towards the pan. "It'd cool faster."

"No, Keith," Hunk said, appalled that he could even suggest such an atrocity, "because putting a hot thing in the fridge warms it up and spoils the food in there, _and_ makes the cookies sticky and leathery instead of soft and crisp."

"I didn't know we had real food left," Lance wondered.

"Just the scraps, but this is space and I'm willing to fight for even the tiniest of leftovers."

“With Hunk’s cooking, so am I.”

The three of them whipped around, Hunk almost swiping the hot gookies to the floor.

“Shiro!” Lance exclaimed. “You did it!”

Shiro stood in front of them, solid and fully opaque and, most importantly, finally able to interact with the world again. He looked exhausted and his tuft of white hair was plastered on his forehead with sweat, but he was grinning from ear to ear.

“I couldn’t help overhearing something about cookies,” he smiled.

Hunk rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry if we were too loud and bothered you,” he said. “But yes, we do have cookies.”

While Hunk’s attention was on Shiro, Lance had snatched a gookie from the baking pan and was throwing it from hand to hand like the hot potato it was and trying to blow at it at the same time to make it cool enough for his mouth. Keith was intently following the flying gookie with his eyes.

Shiro’s eyes trained on the gookie as well, and Hunk turned around following his eyes. “Lance, what did I just tell you?”

“You can’t stop me,” Lance responded and shoved the still most likely scalding cookie into his mouth. “Ow, ow ow! Hot!”

“The hand strikes the eye,” Hunk sighed shaking his head at Lance who was frantically trying to blow at the cookie between his teeth.

The gookie finally cooled enough for Lance to properly bite into it, and he did so with great joy. “Oh my god, Hunk, this is great,” he mumbled around the cookie. “What did you say these were supposed to taste again?

“Apples and cream. Why, did I burn them?”

“No, this just tastes like roasted peppers. Still good, though.”

“It tastes like _what_?” Hunk scrambled for a cookie of his own and took a bite of it after tossing it from one hand to another three times. His face went completely blank and expressionless save for his eyes, which looked at the cookie as if it had just with utmost seriousness claimed the Earth was flat and the center of the universe.

Shiro and Keith took cookies for themselves as well, and they too experienced the odd taste of roasted peppers the baked goods had mysteriously gained.

“Are you sure you didn’t put paprika in these?” Keith asked.

“The castle doesn’t even have that,” Hunk said and munched the rest of his gookie. “I have to ask Coran about this.”

At that moment the kitchen door opened and Pidge walked in. She immediately headed for the confused group of other paladins, and Hunk and Lance shared a nervous look.

“Hunk, I’m so sorry I bit you,” she said. “I don’t know what happened but I will never do it again, I promise.”

“Just bite an enemy next time, alright?”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” Pidge muttered. “Also… I miiight need your help with the robot.”


	2. Chapter 2

After that particular incident the rest of the day passed calmly, or as calmly as life could pass in a castle-shaped spaceship that regularly crossed and blurred the line between science and magic. The paladins made short work of Hunk’s bakings despite their a bit odd taste. After Pidge’s robot was complete Hunk asked Coran about the mysterious flavor change, and received a vague answer about some kind of chemical reaction between the goo and other substances when heated up. Lance and Pidge went Kaltenecker-hunting, an activity they had taken up occasionally where they used ‘old-school’ methods to track down the cow wandering around the castle. They were unsuccessful, like almost every single time before, but most of the thrill was in sneaking about for no real reason anyways. Keith managed to persuade Shiro into resting after his tasking escape from his transdimensional state, only to hit the training deck himself the moment the black paladin agreed to rest.

The following day was spent mostly training. The paladins were really coming together and defeated wave after wave of training robots, until Lance and Keith got into a row during a break that escalated into Keith snarling at the blue paladin with such animosity that everyone stopped what they were doing, and Keith himself had to sit down to wonder why he had done it. While the two paladins had dropped their hostilities from when they first became paladins, the two of them remained at odds the rest of the day, seemingly just out of spite. They did behave after Hunk told that he was very disappointed in both of them, but that didn’t stop them from sticking out their tongues at each other across the room.

The two did finally set their hostilities aside as the new morning came and a new day started, but the peace was not to last. 

Before anybody could even get breakfast the castle received a distress signal from a planet not too far away, something about an incoming asteroid storm that had not shown up on any scanners before it was already too late for the locals to assemble any kind of defense or even evacuate the population on the to-be-destroyed area in time. It was just a short flight away, but time was of essence so Allura opened a portal directly above the planet.

The planet, named Cypeia, was a hellhole of rock, ash, and sulfur, but the draconic locals were thriving in their cities of volcanic rock and cast iron.

“Is that a dragon?” Hunk wondered aloud as the paladins waited in the shadows for Allura to finish talking with a Cypeian on the control room’s big holographic screen and explain the situation better. “That’s definitely a dragon.”

Right then Allura finished the rushed conversation, and turned to the paladins. “We must destroy the asteroids before they hit Cypeia,” she told. “According to Brnitz they have scanners that register anything the atmosphere can’t handle, so we’ll just have to blow everything to small bits until they tell us we’re done.”

“How far are the asteroids?” Shiro asked.

“Not far, we need to hurry.”

The paladins took the unnecessarily fashionable route to their lions, and in no time at all, the five of them had taken position in front of Cypeia. They were a good way away from the planet to give them better room to crunch some rocks, waiting for said rocks’ arrival in their usual formation with Shiro in the middle, Keith and Lance to his right, and Pidge and Hunk to his left.

They didn’t have to wait long; the first pebbles of the storm were arriving already. The small rocks bounced harmlessly off the lions’ armored shoulders, only making themselves known with faint clinks and chimes that sounded throughout the cockpits like distant windchimes. Those rocks would harmlessly burn in the atmosphere, too small to even leave a burning trail bright enough to be visible from the surface.

Then came bigger rocks, boulders even. Those were still small enough to safely burn up before reaching the ground, but would guarantee a beautiful meteor shower. What came behind them, however, was a lot more worrying.

Huge rocks the size of a house, the size of the red lion, the size of the black lion, the size of the castle. And last of all, like a cherry on top of the cake, was a jagged, dark mountain large enough to reduce half of Cypeia to molten slag and plunge the remaining half into a nuclear winter.

“Take out as much as you can,” Shiro instructed. “We’ll attack the biggest asteroid together once the rest is taken care of.”

With a round of yessirs and rogers the paladins broke formation and attacked their non-sentient enemy. Shiro, Lance, and Pidge attacked the rocks with lasers that shattered them with surprising efficiency, and Keith fired with Red’s magma cannon that both shattered the asteroids and melted the remains into bite-sized, glowing hot pieces that cooled into dark gray droplets in the cold, cold vacuum of space. Hunk broke through the rocks with brute force, with Yellow’s booster shell, and the extended claws broke the rocks like they were nothing but dust already.

“Wow!” Hunk whooped as he rammed head first through an asteroid that was twice the size of Yellow and all but shattered to grains on impact. “This is fun!”

He was answered by a chorus of three yeahs, but Shiro did not join in.

“I don’t think these are asteroids,” he said, and the ominous comment shut the other paladins up.

“If they’re not asteroids, then what are they?” Keith asked.

“Remains.”

“Remains? You mean someone blew up a planet and we’re fighting what’s left?”

“That would explain why they break so easily,” Pidge said, “but this can’t be a whole planet even if it blew up in every direction. The scatter doesn’t add up.”

"We can go check it out later. Less talking, more shooting."  
  
There was still so much to destroy that the paladins could not stop now, but the somewhat cheerful mood the task's ease had created was gone. Their pace picked up again soon though, and Keith dared Lance to destroy more rocks than him which resulted in very thorough shattering of even a lot of the smaller rocks that posed no threat to the planet they were protecting. Even the castle joined in, shooting at several chunks of rock at the same time with firepower that all but vaporized a lot of them.  
  
Then all the smaller and bigger not-asteroids were gone, and all was left was the biggest threat of them all, the giant almost black mountain of a rock, hurtling through the remnants of its former companions while spinning slowly around its axis. There were a lot of scorch marks on it's rough surface where a stray shot or a deliberate attack had hit it, but none of them had done hardly anything to it.  
  
"What are we going to do about the big one?" Pidge asked. "Our lasers hardly scratch it."  
  
"Yeah," Hunk agreed, "and that's gotta be at least what, ten miles across?"  
  
"I bet Voltron could cut that in half. Maybe sideways. It's narrower in the middle, right?"  
  
"Princess, can the Castle's ion cannon destroy that thing?"  
  
"I'm not sure," Allura answered Shiro's question. "It was designed to fight against particle barriers and warships and not asteroids, but we can try."  
  
The lions quickly gave the castle and the asteroid a wide berth, to avoid both the incoming laser beam and the hopefully also incoming rock shards and chunks. The cannon charged up for a tense three tics before the glaring blue-white beam shot from the castle to the rock.  
  
Where the ion cannon's beam raked the rock's surface the stone appeared to simply evaporate away, and the weapon left a deep and wide gouge where it hit, but the majority of the rock remained untouched. The most notable affect was the rock's axis tilting from the impact and the slight change in trajectory.  
  
"That is one tough rock," Pidge wondered. "How are we ever going to destroy it in time?"  
  
"Maybe we don't have to," Shiro said. "We could try to push it away so it will pass safely past Cypeia."  
  
"Do we have enough thrusters for that?" Lance asked.  
  
"Let's hope," Shiro said and turned Black towards the rock. The four paladins followed, and the five positioned themselves against the rock face in steady intervals.  
  
"Wait for it... Now!"  
  
The paladins gave it what they got, and slowly, slowly the colossus's spinning came to a halt. Then it was pushed off its course, not yet enough to see with naked eyes but enough for a computer to notice, and then more and more, but the mountain was still flying towards Cypeia and even if the acceleration to the other direction would remain constant (which it would without outside help), it would be caught in the planet's pull and either disrupt whatever tidal conditions the planet had going on with its small moon, or orbit the planet two to five times before falling in and carving a giant path of destruction that would be at least a quarter planet long. Both of those opinions would do less damage than a direct, unhindered impact, but neither were preferable.  
  
Only one person was aware of these odds, and he was not going to stay quiet about it.  
  
"You can't change the asteroid's trajectory enough with the lions," said an image of Slav that out of nowhere popped up on each lion's display. "In all foreseeable realities it will damage the planet in some way if you continue like that."  
  
Shiro made a noise of frustration somewhere between a groan and a growl. "Then what can we do?" He asked. "We're too close to stop and form Voltron."

“The castle has huge and powerful engines,” Slav continued, “and by activating the frontal particle barrier to prevent the direct impact against the rock face and the damage it would do to the central tower and hangar doors, it should be able to create enough both thrust and grip necessary to push the asteroid off-course by an additional five degrees.”

“Then let’s get to it,” Coran said and steered the castle adeptly against the rock while Allura partially activated the particle barrier.

The Particle barrier- much like the ion cannon- had not been designed to protect against giant rocks and the small piece of shield on the castle’s port was pushed closer to the castle itself as it revved up than anyone was really comfortable with, but the two didn’t touch, and since the acceleration had happened after the barrier’s impact on the rock, it wasn’t too big a problem. The rock now accelerated faster, though still not fast by any means due to its size. Slav was calculating its trajectory, muttering it under his breath, and announced out loud when it would no longer hit Cypeia.

“We did it!” Hunk rejoiced. “The power of friendship and advanced mathematics really can move mountains!”

“We should probably lead it somewhere safe”, Allura said. “A rock this big can cause damage elsewhere.”

“Can we throw it into the star?” Keith asked.

“You just want to see it burn to cosmic dust,” Lance accused, and Keith didn’t deny it.

“I think we should crash it to one of the outer planets,” Shiro disagreed. “The composition is strange, and there could be rare minerals in it.”

In the end they steered the giant space rock into the furthest rock planet in the system, but not before checking in with the Cypeians that nobody was down on that planet and that there also wasn’t any infrastructure going on they might destroy in the process. They set the rock on an acute collision course that hopefully wouldn’t light the barren planet’s almost nonexistent but still present atmosphere on fire and create a 150-mile glass crater on impact. Even if the planet was completely uninhabited, there was no need to cause unnecessary destruction where it could be avoided.

Allura contacted the Cypeians once more, this time talking to someone else than Brintz the astrogeologist she had been working with earlier. The Paladins changed out of their spacesuits and headed to the kitchen for a well-earned breakfast, which by now had been postponed to being either brunch or lunch. On their way there the humans quite literally ran into Slav, who was on his way to the particle barrier power generator for incomprehensible reasons.

Shiro, who like usual was walking first, rounded a corner and smacked right into Slav. Neither of them fell, but Shiro might have stepped on Slav’s toes and Slav might have jabbed no less than two elbows between Shiro’s ribs. Slav clutched his foot and took a few hops in place, all the wile muttering how this particular incident would result in his untimely demise in at least thirteen realities, but Shiro unexpectedly snarled bestially, a sound almost identical to what Keith had made at Lance yesterday. Slav scurried off almost immediately, paying no mind to the sound Shiro had just made and occasionally skipping on one leg as he went, but the four other paladins stared at him in shock.

“What?” Shiro asked, holding a hand to where he’d been accidentally elbowed and clearly completely unaware of what he’d just done.

“You just snarled at Slav,” Pidge said.

“I did not.”

“Yes you did,” Lance said and Hunk nodded as well. “You sounded exactly like Keith did yesterday, remember that?”

“Did I sound like that?” Keith asked.

“Uhh, yeah. I thought you were gonna live up to your Galra heritage and eat me.”

“Yeah, as if I’d let anything that nasty near my mouth.”

“Nasty? Me? Please, remind me which one of us knows about the existence of soap.”

“Stop bickering you two,” Pidge chastised. “Can’t you see Shiro is having an existential crisis?”

Existential crisis was a bit of an exaggeration, but the black paladin did have a look between thoughtfulness and mild horrification on his face.

“You okay, Shiro?” Hunk asked, concerned.

Shiro nodded. “Let’s just go eat something.”

\---

After finally getting some very late breakfast, the paladins gathered to their favorite lounge to think about what had happened over the past few days. It was the best comfortable environment for addressing something all of them were at least a bit afraid to talk about.

“This all has to be connected somehow,” Pidge said. “The hissing, the snarling, the biting.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who’s been doing the biting part,” Lance pointed out, but Pidge ignored him.

“Is it a disease?” Keith asked. “One of those that target the nervous system.”

“No, it can’t be that,” Hunk said. “Coran constantly checks us for head injuries and nerve damage and stuff like that, it would show.”

“Glad to know we don’t have a bad case of space rabies,” Lance joked, but was visibly relieved to know that disease was out of the picture. "Could it be cabin fever then? Or castle fever, since we're in a magical flying castle. People can go mad from that."

Shiro shook his head. "I don't think it’s that. The castle is big and we have a lot of room for ourselves and a lot of things to do both here and out there saving the universe."

Lance shrugged in response. "Well, you _are_ the expert in sitting in a spaceship for months," he commented.

Hunk, who was tapping his fingers together in thought, spoke next. "It could be just built up anxiety and stress right? We have a lot of pressure on us."

"I don't think we would start now if it was that," Keith said. "We haven't had anything that big in a while."

Hunk sat up from his relaxed slump to face Keith. "Nothing that big?" He repeated disbelief heavy on his voice. "Keith, we've fought two giant Galra battle fleets and freed three planets from under strict Galra oppression, and that's just in the last two weeks, not to mention that we saved millions of people just this morning."

The red paladin raised his forearms defensively. "All I'm saying is we've had tougher times than now. Nobody's trying to kill us right now. None of us has been attacked by killer food."

Before Hunk could say anything back, Pidge opened her mouth. "Maybe we should ask Allura," she suggested. "We've had a lot of training exercises that literally get inside our heads and that's not even mentioning the lions. It could be a side effect."

Lance sat up. "You're saying it's magic," he concluded. "All the science in the world and _you_ settle for magic."

"It's not all magic," Pidge argued back. "Besides, everything else we've gone through has been tested during documented human history and hasn't caused this kind of behavior that wasn't an isolated case. It's the only thing I can think of that would affect us all at about the same time."

Lance and Pidge both turned to look at Shiro, as if he had the authority to either prove or disprove Pidge's hypothesis. He just shrugged. "Let's go ask the princess."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About this chapter's pic: I was too tired to draw anything with details but I wanted to put something there


	3. Chapter 3

They found Allura in the control room. She was reading star charts with Coran and cross referencing any data either gained with the castle sensors or stolen from Galra with the ten thousand years old charts the castle had. This was both to get the castle’s data more up to date, and to find out where the rock debris had come from. She greeted them but didn't stop her work.

"Princess, we have a question for you," Shiro said as the paladins walked over to her.

Once they had her attention, Pidge stepped up. "We've experienced changes in our behavior in the last week or so. Nothing that big, but also nothing we'd normally do. Do you think the telepathic interface we train with or the connection with the lions could have side effects? They're not exactly designed for our species."

"What kind of changes?" Coran inquired. "I can think of quite a few illnesses with behavioral changes as symptoms."

Lance was visibly unnerved by Coran's comment despite the sound reasoning against the claim earlier, but Pidge continued her explanation. "We've started hissing and growling at each other. I actually bit Hunk two days ago, Keith snarled at Lance yesterday, and just after this morning’s mission Shiro snarled at Slav." She counted the incidents with her fingers. "Not to mention Keith and Lance have been hissing at each other during their hourly arguments and I've been subconsciously doing it a lot."

"Excuse you Pidge, but we don't argue every hour!" Lance exclaimed and folded his arms in protest.

"You did yesterday," Pidge smirked. "I timed it."

Lance let out a small hiss in response. Hunk pointed at him. "See princess? That's happening to all of us."

"Except Hunk," Keith added.

"Hey, I've hissed one time," Hunk protested. "I just don't get angry as easy as you."

Keith crossed his arms and frowned in response. As the talking had stopped, the other paladins turned their focus back to Allura expectantly. She was deep in thought but soon enough her face brightened.

"I never knew the previous paladins that well, but I remember hearing from my father that they all picked up behavioral and elemental traits from their lions," she told. "I wouldn't have expected it so soon though. It took years for the old paladins to get there, and it's been just a few months..."

"You also said that the old paladins had much more time to train together and didn't have a sword of Damocles hanging over them," Shiro pointed out.

Allura nodded in thought, but Coran shot a look at Keith. "What's this about a sword?"

"It's a proverb from Greek mythology back on Earth," Pidge said quickly before Coran would go off about weapon safety. "It means there's a metaphorical sword hanging over us on only a thin string. Like the threat of Zarkon physically and mentally weighing down on us."

"Yeah, anyway," Hunk interrupted. "What's this about cat behavior?"

"You will start exhibiting feline traits as a side effect from your strong bonds with your lions. It's supposed to help with your connections in the heat of battle, but it will be heavily present in everyday life as well-"

"For real?" Lance exclaimed. "Now the rest of us will be furries too!"

Hunk raised an eyebrow. "Rest of us?"

"Yeah," Lance said unfolding his arms and letting one drop to his side while gesturing towards Keith with the other. "I mean, Keith's already a furry, and we're all gonna be furries too. And Keith will be double furry."

Keith's frown deepened. "I'm not a furry."

Lance turned to face the red paladin. "Yes you are, you're Galra and the Galra are furries."

Keith's frown grew even deeper. A few more claims and his face would fold in on itself. "I'm not even purple. I have no visible Galra traits to make me a furry."

Before Lance could say anything, Pidge piped in with an animesque fixing of her glasses. "I hate to take Lance's side here Keith, but your eyes reflect light in the dark and your skin color _is_ closer to purple than it is to a healthy shade of someone who lived on a desert as a hobo for a year."

"Take that mullet man," Lance snickered and high-fived Pidge.

"So is he a furry or not," asked Hunk, curious to get answers but hesitant to pick a side.

"What's a furry?" asked Coran, hearing the double meaning but not understanding the term.

Before any of the younger paladins (either Lance or Pidge) could launch into a thorough explanation about furries, Shiro sighed, flesh hand on his hip and metal hand pinching the bridge of his nose. "No-one's a furry. And Lance, shame on you for bringing this up."

"But daaaad," Lance whined. Shiro only rolled his eyes and raised his hand to signal that he was done talking about this, and that everybody else should drop the subject as well.

The silence lasted for a short yet extremely awkward while until Hunk broke it. "So do we have to kinkshame Lance again?"

"Hunk, you wound me," Lance gasped with feint betrayal thick on his voice. "I thought we were friends!"

“We are, but if someone starts getting kinky it’s gonna get really weird really quickly since there’s what, eight of us in the castle,” Hunk said while gesturing to the other six people in the room besides him.

“Nine if you count Kaltenecker.”

“Pidge, why are you like this?”

\---

Once the star charts had been read and some cosmic math made, the castle of lions set off to the direction where the asteroids had come from to get to the bottom of their sudden appearance and odd scatter. On their way the paladins destroyed several small asteroids clearly from the same source with the small defense drones, but not before their trajectories and masses had been measured and calculated to help further pinpoint their source.

It was good fun, but it was made especially fun by the fact that all the paladins were now suspicious of the others, trying to spot anything odd or distinctly feline in them while still trying to engage in the rock shooting competition Coran was graciously keeping tallies for. (Lance and Pidge were tied for first place, but they were also the ones most into it.)

Eventually they came across a mangled planetoid. It was floating in a cloud of rock shards and dust and ash and chunks, and most of it looked like it had once been a single whole celestial body that had burst open from the inside and spewed its rocky insides into a dense cloud of destruction. The cloud was obscuring the view and they could only faintly see the planetoid itself, but the castle was too large to safely enter the dust cloud.

“We need a closer look at that thing, right?” Hunk asked as he tilted his head this way and that at the image of the obscured planetoid the grand display was displaying, not even realizing what he was doing. “Big space rocks just don’t up and explode.”

“Thank you for volunteering to go check it out, number two!”

“What- no! I did not volunteer!” Hunk protested. “What if whatever caused that is still there?”

“Lance can go with you.”

“No, no, no, I am _not_ going in there!” Lance hurried to deny.

“Are you scared?” Keith asked with an arched eyebrow.

“Wha- why’d you- of course not!” Lance stuttered. “I will go there and I will scan the shit out of that planetoid!” He turned heel and hurried towards his lion, fists clenched, probably to hide his reluctance to go. Shiro shouted a weak ‘language’ at him, but the blue paladin was gone. Hunk shook his head and jogged after him.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Lance muttered once he and Hunk were both in their lions and on their way through the abundance of small to medium sized rocks that formed most of the cloud. Their viewports had been linked to the castle’s and the three other humans, Coran, and Allura were receiving live footage of the dense cloud and a shadowy shape somewhere inside it.

When the planetoid came to view, it was much like they had expected it to be, but to see it in real life was shocking.

“It looks like a weblum passed through here,” Hunk said quietly. “At least whoever did this has left.”

The planetoid was about fifty miles across and roughly round, and about a third of it had been blown to smithereens. It had a now-exposed core of the same dark, almost black ore the giant asteroid had been, and in the dark stone were even darker cracks where the power of whatever explosion had occurred had fractured it. Lance activated Blue’s sonar and scanned the planetoid, and the force of the scan, however minute it was, loosened black dust from the cracks.

“What can you get from that?” Lance asked as he sent the data to the castle. “Hold on- there’s tunnels there. I’ll go check it out.”

There indeed were two straight and perfectly round tunnels from the undamaged side of the planetoid to the point of the explosion. They were too narrow for both Blue and Yellow, but they could stick their heads in if they wanted to. (They didn’t.) The tunnels’ walls had scorched badly and their mouths had been fractured from the explosion.

“Those look like bomb chutes,” Keith commented on the tunnels. “Could that be a weapons test site?”

“Could be,” Pidge said as she went over the data from Lance. “There’s a lot of residue that’s consistent with a lot of different kinds of explosives.”

“I think you’re onto something with that,” said Hunk who had flown over to the planetoid’s whole side where the tunnels’ other end was. “Look at this.”

Around the tunnel mouths- that had clearly been drilled from this side- was equipment not only to drill a hole like that but also to safely insert something explosive in it, and also something only Coran recognized as mining equipment of some sort. All of it was abandoned, which was great news since all of it had been made from an all-too familiar purplish metal alloy.

“Looks like the Galra came here, blew it up and left.”

“Can you go check if there’s any kind of logs left? I want to know what happened here and if we should be worried about it.”

Lance let out a low growl but he and Hunk exited their lions and went out to check out the abandoned site. The planetoid wasn’t big enough to have a noticeable gravitational pull, but all the paladins had had a lot of both voluntary and involuntary practice on how to move around with their jetpacks in the weightlessness of space, so Lance and Hunk had no trouble moving around. There wasn’t a whole lot out there, but Lance found a small computer station in the machine that had inserted the explosives into the holes and Hunk even managed to access it with his extremely rudimentary knowledge of the Galra language and download what little files there were. They had to deal with the Galra so much that it was very useful to know a few basic written words, such as file, no, access, hangar, alert, fighter, dreadnought, prison, intruder, and other relevant things like that. Hunk sent the files to Pidge who began to decode their half-assed decryption, and the legs of Voltron returned to the castle. Pidge had the files -which turned out to be the very logs they had been hoping to find- decrypted and translated before Hunk and Lance were even halfway through the dust cloud, so she read aloud a brief summary for the two of them to hear as well.

“The Galra were testing new explosives for mining use,” she told. “They tested two different kinds and both were bad, too volatile. The specifics are here too, the fools… These aren’t hard to make, not hard at all…”

“No, Pidge.”

“Spoilsport.”

“We need to keep an eye on this, if the Galra are looking for new kinds of explosives even for mining it could be trouble,” Allura reasoned.

“And who knows,” Lance said, his face grinning on the edge of the command room’s big screen, “maybe we get to intercept a few extra bomb shipments. I be Keith would just _love_ to see those go up in flames.”

Keith glared at him in annoyance, but couldn’t disagree.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long and is kinda short. I'll try harder to get into the writing zone in the future

Three quintants passed, and Voltron did intercept two Galra shipments but neither were explosives; one was a small cargo ship transporting weapons and the other a two sizes larger ship full of raw materials. They blew up the first transport and successfully infiltrated the other, downloaded its logs, and confiscated most of its cargo by opening all the cargo bay doors and picking up all the ores and metals and crystals and parts and other supplies from space. Then they blew up that one too.

They hadn’t exactly been short on anything, the castle was surprisingly well-stocked for something that was over ten thousand years old, but they didn’t have any money (at least nothing that would have any value in present-day space) and something unexpected might happen anytime.

Encouraged by the sudden appearance of usable materials Slav all by himself decided that the castle’s major water filtration and waste-recycling systems and mechanisms needed to be cleaned, reprogrammed, and repaired. By the time anyone noticed what he was up to, the eight-armed genius had turned off half the systems and dismantled no less than three large control modules. At first Coran was furious, but soon agreed that the systems did need to be properly checked over even if Slav’s total destruction and reconstruction of everything was a bit excessive.

After a long time looking after the castle alone, Coran had a hard time adjusting to another person doing maintenance and upgrades at first, especially one as filled with personality as Slav. He had soon bounced back though, and accepted the help. He still sometimes cringed at Slav's method of not asking for permission before dismantling a system or a small part of the castle, but since the genius built them back better and more efficient and was usually making an effort to inform Coran, he made his best effort to get along.

In the end everyone in the castle was roped into helping in some way to get the renovation over with quicker. Pidge and Hunk helped Slav and Coran in mechanical and digital areas, and Allura worked the rest of the castle systems around the large construction site spanning the entire castle and kept everything -especially life support- in working order. Shiro, Keith, and Lance who were less helpful in the technical got roped into the less than pleasant task of physically cleaning several large pipes and tanks. Robots to do that particular task had existed at some point, but most of them were broken down, had been scavenged for parts by Pidge, Hunk, and Coran, or both. The little that did remain were sent to take care of parts the humans couldn’t fit into, since the mice had mysteriously disappeared the moment Coran broke out the cleaning supplies.

\---

“This is the worst,” Lance complained as he was scrubbing the grimy water tank bottom. It was slippery, and the odd but efficient combination of a broom and a mop he was wielding loosened and pushed around the milky remains of long-dead and calcified algae that had grown on the tank’s submerged inside during the earlier years of the castle’s ten-thousand-year sleep. “Once we get this done, I’m never gonna complain about having to clean the cryopods again.”

“You’re just saying that,” muttered Keith who was cleaning the tank’s walls with a similar cleaning implement.

“No, I’m not,” Lance said as he attacked another spot of grimy tank floor with his broom-mop. Broop. “I am never-not-once-ever gonna complain about cleaning the cryopods ever again. This is so gross.”

“Look on the bright side, at least it doesn’t smell.”

“Since when are you an optimist?”

“Since you started whining.”

“I’m not whining,” Lance whined and moved on from the tank bottom to the wall with his broop. Keith just rolled his eyes at the blue paladin, and they were silent for a long while. The only sounds were the unusually quiet background hum of the castle and the quiet scratching sound their broops made as they scraped off the thin layer of calcified algae in small flakes that also scratched against each other.

“Do we have to flush this stuff away as well?” Lance asked when all the tank’s insides had been brooped once and the flaky calcium sludge was slowly but steadily sliding down the tank walls.

“Don’t know.”

“Hey Coran!” Lance called out of the tank’s open hatch to the royal advisor who should still be working in the same room the tank opened to. “Do we have to flush this?”

In no time at all the Altean’s mustached face appeared in the hatch above them. He quickly checked over the tank’s current condition before answering. “No, that’s just fine as it is. It will flush itself once we direct the water back in.”

“But this is a clean water tank,” Keith pointed out. Won’t it get contaminated by all this?” He waved an arm at the ancient algae remains all over the tank.

“Sure,” Coran said and waved his hand dismissively, “but to get everything clean and properly working we’ll have to let it all cycle through a few times nonetheless. A little extra calcium is nothing.”

Coran disappeared from the hatch, and Lance and Keith were left alone in the tank again. They looked at each other.

“Soooo… Next tank?”

“Sure, let’s go.”

They climbed out up the very narrow ladder coming down from the hatch, then past the tank Shiro was scrubbing in and onto the next one.

\---

Eventually all the water tanks were scrubbed, first the ones for clean water and then the ones Involved in the purification of dirty water. They were a lot less pleasant than the clean ones, though thankfully they too had been full of clean water during the castle’s long sleep. Still, the microscopic algae in them was not only alive but also seemed to be sentient, though that one might just be because Keith slipped on it and refused to admit he’d just stepped on it bad.

When Lance, Keith, and Shiro emerged from the tanks thy were all covered in slime stains, Keith with the most and Lance with the least. Shiro had had a little mishap of his own, but he hadn’t faceplanted onto the tank wall like the red paladin had, so only his left side was covered in little light greenish gray calcium flakes and slime. The three of them headed for their rooms for showers (that hopefully would be working) and run into Pidge, who was absolutely covered in the exact same stuff as they were.

“What happened to you?” Keith asked before Pidge could tell them not to ask.

“One of the cleaning robots broke down in the pipes,” she told glumly. “And guess who had to go fetch it.”

“You.”

“Right on one.”

“I don’t suppose Coran told you whether the showers work or not?”

“They should, but you might want to be quick just in case.”

The showers did work, but the water quality got more dubious towards the ends of their quick ablutions. Still, it was long enough to get rid of the milky white and paper-thin calcium flakes and the unpleasant but thankfully faint smell of the slimier tanks. They even got their dirtied clothes out of the cleaners before Coran announced that from now on use of clean water would be prohibited, mostly because there was no clean water at the moment thanks to all the grime they had scrubbed loose on all the tanks, and all that remained usable was in the main generator’s emergency cooling system which was _absolutely_ not to be messed with while even the most minor system in the castle was operating.

And that was another problem: all but the absolute bare minimum of the water constantly used to cool off the castle’s huge engines was unavailable. The castle couldn’t move anywhere lest they overheat the engines, nor could they use the particle barrier or any of the weapons. A lot of the ‘creepy parts’ in the lower castle were completely shut down while the water systems worked themselves out, as were the elevators, training areas, and the pod launch bay. The rest of the castle went into a sort of power save mode with dimmed lights and, as the wait stretched on, temperature fluctuations throughout the entire castle. The control room and the lion bays especially were cold, and the closer to the engines you got the warmer the air became until the metal walls were painful to touch with bare hands. Thankfully the engines were lower than any of the currently usable areas, and the rising heat got a welcome circulation going.

The paladins had gathered to their favorite lounge in the ‘habitable zone’ where the temperature was comfortable to pass the time somehow, since the training rooms were closed and even if they could do a lot of training in the lounge or in the corridors, the unavailability of showers made that an unappealing activity. They had been playing ‘road trip games’, as Hunk called them, for over two vargas, but without the excitement of going somewhere and the changing scenery to add sensory input to the humdrum of the game they all were getting twitchy. The fact that Keith seemed to only manage to come up with obscure birds for their guessing game didn’t help.

“is there anything else we can do?” Lance groaned from his upside-down seat on the sofa after the fifth time no-one guessed Keith’s bird. “What do we even do here all day anyways?”

“Train.”

“Make robots.”

“Blow up stuff.”

“And can we do any of those things at the moment?”

“No.”

“Ugh,” Lance groaned and stuck his legs that were partially on the floor above the sunken couch up in the air. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’d even welcome a cryopod cleaning session right now.”

“I thought you made a promise to never complain about the cryopods again,” Keith said snidely.

“I’m not complaining, I’m wishing I had something to do.”

“You two could brawl,” Pidge suggested from across the couch circle with a disinterested voice. “The rest of us could give you style points.”

“No brawling outside the training room,” Shiro said with the exact same tired tone as Pidge.

“I’m bored enough to start chasing a laser pointer,” Hunk joked, or maybe not. He was bored enough to seriously consider it.

“Do you _have_ a laser pointer?” Keith asked almost hopefully.

“No.”

“We live in a magic sci-fi castle, why don’t we have a laser pointer?” Lance asked with all seriousness.

“Coran seems like a responsible adult who could have one,” Shiro suggested, still using the tired tone.

“Aren’t you a responsible adult too?”

“I’m off duty.”

“Are you sure? You just told us not to brawl.”

“Fine, brawl then.”

But nobody moved to brawl, let alone get up. The boredom had sunken in, like a weighed blanked pressing them all down into the couch, or maybe like their bones were made out of lead.

“Pidge, doesn’t your laptop have like, games or something?” Lance asked after several doboshes of silence.

“The battery ran out.”

“Damn.”

“Is there _anything_ we can do?” Keith asked.

“You could try throwing knives at the target practice robot Pidge bit me over,” Hunk suggested.

“Sure. Where is it?”

“No, there’s no way you’re stabbing my robot.”

“Then why’d you make it?” Lance asked. “You said it’s for target practice. What’s the point if we can’t use it as a target?”

Pidge groaned. “Whatever, I can always make a new one. But I’m not telling you where my robot stash is, I’m getting it myself.” With that she got up, stretched, and walked out of the room.

“Pidge has a robot stash?” Lance asked once she was gone. The other three just shrugged.

Pidge came back soon enough, slightly shivering as if she'd had to trek to some closed-off area or another, and clutching a smallish robot. Hunk and Lance had seen it already, but both Keith and Shiro looked up to see it.

It was about the size of a Galra drone, with a small and silent hover engine, five pointy wings that would balance it in the air and help it make tight turns, and several 'eyes' that gave it an almost 360 degree vision, save for a few blind spots. On top of that, it should at least in theory be able to redirect the energy from the blaster shots it would receive in target training, using a fraction of the energy to power itself and expelling the rest from the wings. It was all still untested, but both Pidge and Hunk were confident it would work.

Still, the little drone would not withstand a direct stab from an ordinary knife, no matter how extraordinary material luxite might be.

Pidge turned the robot on and it immediately flew out of her hands and came to a steady hover a meter or so above her head, slowly spinning around its axis and making tiny barely audible adjustments with its wings.

"It's on 'dodge'," Pidge said and flopped back on the couch next to Hunk. "Go wild."

Keith stared at the hovering and spinning robot and got up. Without breaking eye contact with the robot's eyes he walked over to it, raised his arm, and swatted at it. When his hand was a foot away, the robot veered away and stopped right beyond his reach. Keith went to reach for it again, and again the robot dodged. The red paladin stared at the robot and squinted. Still keeping eye contact with the robot, or as much as he could as the lenses facing him constantly changed, he took off his jacket and threw it back on the couch to the spot he'd been sitting on. Then he lunged at the robot.

The target drone whizzed around the lounge, Keith bounding after it as it changed directions unpredictably after every swat, like a cat tossing around a half-conscious shrew. The other four were following the robot with their eyes.

“That’s… surprisingly entertaining to watch,” Hunk commented after some time of watching Keith chase the drone around the room.

Just then the quick robot changed direction and flew over the circle of couches. This itself wouldn’t have been a problem, but the red paladin who wildly leaped after it was. His eyes focused on the robot, Keith did not see where his leap would land him until it was too late, and before anyone could even yell a warning he crashed right into Shiro, their knees colliding painfully and Keith’s elbow narrowly missing Shiro’s face. The black paladin let out a hiss of annoyance or pain and swatted Keith with his hand. Instinctively Keith swatted back, and they engaged in a very brief slap fight before Keith scampered after the drone again. Shiro glared after him.

“Aww, that was so cute!”

Shiro turned around to look at Lance, who was looking at him like one would look at a kitten sneezing. “What?”

“The slap fight!” Lance exclaimed, waving a hand around for emphasis. “That’s _exactly_ what cats do!”

Shiro looked at him incredulously, and then at Hunk and Pidge, who after a quick glance at each other gave uncomfortably well-coordinated simultaneous shrugs of resignation.

“Sorry Shiro, but Lance is right,” Hunk said. “You’re a cat now.”

“We’re all cats now,” Pidge added.


End file.
